Saturday, November 5, 2011

For a south Indian, that was a non-accessible track.
For a south Indian, that was an ‘alien’ vehicle.

Now it is time to strike off all such phases and sentences. The authorities have somehow managed to drag the metro bogies on the track. On October 20, 2011 the metro was flagged off by Union Urban Development Minister Kamal Nath and Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi in the presence of Karnataka Chief Minister Sadananda Gowda. After a number of date slips and extensions, now the people of Bangaluru are ready to taste the new flavour of rapid-transit. The idea which born two decades back had been rolling from table to table and got autopsied many times. But the people were given hope when Prime minister laid the foundation stone on June 4, 2006 for the first phase.

I was there along with my friends at the station just two days after the flag off. While seeing the train moving on the bridge, many film songs flashed in my mind. It was like a trend and now too it seems like a trend in film-song picturisation that the hero-heroine compo does sing love tunes keeping such trains as background. I am not going vague, putting cine interpretation. Seeing such a thing for the first time in our own city should make us blissful. We stood in the queue for a long time as we were doing at a typical cinema hall queue and somehow managed to get inside the train.

The token system and the scanning plates at the entrance and exit were absolutely new for us and only seconds got consumed for such techno processes. When the train came on the platform the whole junk of people were busy taking photographs rather than flooding into the compartment, which we generally do. All eyes were on the train. She is beautiful and the black-grey colour combination and the red thick strip over the sides which bears the ‘namma metro’ logo looked nice. No past experience and no reference to compare ’namma metro’, but from others who had spent time in other existing Indian metro trains, we came to know that ‘Namma Metro’ also holds quality and style. Hope it would be a splendid transit system for Bangaluru, once the whole city rail network is completed. Track from MG road to Bayappana hali which covers 7 km belongs to the first phase and the whole system covers a distance of 41 km.

The effectiveness of the system would come only after the completion of entire project. Seven on forty-one km has done but about the rest, the picture is still vague. I didn’t see IT industry areas like Whitefield and Electronic city in the proposed metro network for the ‘city of flowers’. If those areas are out of the list, it would be a sad part and the system should be integrated connecting such IT hubs along with other residential and commercial points. Let the ‘namma metro’ vroom across the city and shatter the road transport including the buses which consume fuel and pollute like anything. Also,’ Namma metro, kill the jams, traffic jams’